Thursday, May 10, 2018

Morgan (director/writer Ingrid Jungermann) and her ex-girlfriend Jean (Ann
Carr) may not have worked out as a couple, what with Morgan’s closed-off
emotional life and Jean’s tendency to put everything out in the open, but they
are working very well together with the podcast about female serial killers –
“Women Who Kill” - they are continuing to make. They aren’t just talking about
the serial killers, they are actually visiting the women in prison to interview
them.

Things could go on this way forever, but when Morgan meets the mysterious
Simone (Sheila Vand) at her local co-op (full disclosure: as a German living in
a small town, I had to look up what the hell that is about) and falls for her
instantly. Quickly, the two become a couple, Simone’s general air of mystery
enabling Morgan for once in a relationship to relax. For a time, that is, for
there might be something too mysterious going on with Simone. What’s a gal
making a podcast about female serial killers with a bunch of rather enabling
friends to think?

If you’re like me, you probably think that a lesbian comedy about podcasts
and serial murder sounds rather too twee or too produced for the hipster set.
However, Ingrid Jungermann’s film isn’t any of that, and it’s too good a film
for me to care what hipsters are thinking about it one way or the other. This is
a clever, compassionate but never cowardly film about commitment phobia (why
doesn’t English have a decent compound noun for this?), loneliness, and love
that is as funny as it is sad, grounding its more outrageous moments (don’t
worry, there’s no splatstick in this one) in surroundings built at least in
emotional veracity, and never looks down on its characters.

It is the sort of comedy that has to be funny because otherwise, it would be
a tearjerker of the highest degree. Instead of allowing its audience to wallow
in misery, its humour actually helps us to look closer at the reasons for that
prospective wallowing. The film also teaches the valuable lesson that taking
relationship advice from a serial killer just might not be the best idea. Irony
aside, the ending does pack quite an emotional wallop, one the film has worked
hard to achieve and that resonates with quite a bit of metaphorical and thematic
work it had introduced before without becoming loud about it.

The cast as a whole is rather on the brilliant side, with Jungermann finding
great foils in Sagher and Carr and vice versa. After A Girl Walks Home Alone
at Night, Vand is apparently now typecast as the Mysterious One, but she’s
really rather good at it. Plus, Simone may be mysterious but feels like a very
different character from the Girl.

I suspect in two decades time, this will not only be a great, intelligent
little comedy about not so little things, but also a time capsule. Which mostly
seems to happen to films that come about their naturalistic elements from a side
angle, and not so much those where realism is the only reason for their
existence. This is only an aside, though, for Women Who Kill is a
brilliant independent film all around.